Sunday, April 26, 2015

The Chimp&See Videos are collected by our dedicated PanAf site managers and collaborators from 40 temporary and long-term research sites across Africa.What can you expect when you are scanning through the videos?Sometimes you will see blank videos because maybe leaves or a bug triggered the camera.Sometimes you will see our site managers and field staff testing the cameras and adjusting the settings, so prepare for some nostril shots!But hopefully a lot of the time you will see some of the unique wildlife from many different chimpanzee habitats!Before submitting their videos to Chimp&See, our site managers need to quickly scan the videos to make sure the cameras are working properly and set up at locations that actually record animals. During some of these scans some amazing observations have already been made!In January we released a press release with our partners the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project, Ugandan Wildlife Authority, Uganda National Council for Science and Technology and PantheraYou can read the whole press release here: First Known Footage of African Golden Cat Hunting in Daylight Captured in UgandaSamuel Angedakin, Project Manager at our collaborative Kibale Forest site in Uganda, recorded this amazing footage of an African Golden Cat hunting some monkeys, the first time ever this has been recorded (spoiler alert: the cat goes home hungry):

More recently, Ivonne Kienast, Project Manager at our collaborative site in Bateke Plateau Gabon (in cooperation with the Aspinall Foundation and Panthera) recorded a male lion on several of her camera traps. This marked the first time a lion had been seen in Gabon since the last century and has already drawn focus and conservation action to the region to encourage natural repatriation of lions to the area.

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Happy Earth Day! Be a Citizen Scientist and help us learn about chimps and humans!

Chimp&See is a web-based platform where enthusiastic amateur researchers can watch and document the contents of the Pan African Programme: The Cultured Chimpanzee (PanAf) remote camera trap videos. We have collected nearly 7,000 hours of footage, reflecting various chimpanzee habitats, from camera traps in 15 countries across Africa.

By scanning the videos from these traps and identifying the types of species and activity that you see, you’ll help us to understand the lives of these apes – their behaviors, relationships, and environments – and to extrapolate new ideas about human origins.

The PanAf is based out of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and aims to quantify a broad spectrum of the ecological parameters that possibly contribute to generating behavioural diversity in chimpanzees. For this we have been collecting systematic ecological, social, demographic and behavioral data from 40 chimpanzee temporary research sites (TRS). These are spread out over the whole natural range of chimpanzees, including all extremes of their habitats, and placed systematically across their area of occurrence, to be able to tease apart the genetic, ecological and social drivers of diversity generating processes. Most of the TRS focus on populations which have never been studied in detail, however, some are also located at well-established long-term research sites.

Citizen Science innovators at Zooniverse developed the Chimp&See platform in collaboration with the PanAf and the project was joint funded by Zooniverse, the Heinz L. Krekeler Foundation and the Max Planck Society Innovation Fund.